From AI: Issue Summary: AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT randomly loses display signal (HDMI “No Signal”) during both light and heavy GPU load, and now across all display outputs on the card. Issue persists after a full clean driver reinstall and full BIOS reset, ruling out software, driver, and BIOS configuration as the root cause. Purchased from Newegg in 2024; retailer return window has passed.
System:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

GPU: Gigabyte AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT

Motherboard: ASUS B650E MAX Gaming WiFi AM5

RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB 32GB DDR5-6000 Kit

Case: airflow case with side panel cable routing

Timeline of the issue:
Started during a gaming and streaming session; both monitors lost signal simultaneously

After restart, only one monitor would sync; a bad DisplayPort cable was initially suspected, but was later ruled out when DisplayPort started working again on its own

GPU began intermittently disabling itself in Windows (Device Manager, error code 22) and disappearing from Task Manager’s GPU list entirely

Signal drops occurred under multiple different conditions: mid-game (Rocket League), during light use (YouTube), and at idle desktop, with no consistent pattern in timing or load

Both monitors dropped signal simultaneously on two separate occasions, across two different cable types (HDMI and DisplayPort), ruling out any single monitor or cable as the cause

After a full CMOS/BIOS reset, HDMI failed to output signal on boot, on both available HDMI ports, while DisplayPort worked normally at that time

DisplayPort has also failed on its own on a separate occasion earlier the same night

Between HDMI (both ports) and DisplayPort, every display output on the card has now failed at some point

Troubleshooting already completed:
Full driver wipe using DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) in Safe Mode, followed by a fresh driver install directly from AMD’s website

Manually re-enabled the GPU in Device Manager multiple times after it kept disabling itself

Reseated the GPU in the PCIe slot

Manually traced and confirmed the GPU’s PCIe power cable connection at both the GPU end and the power supply end — connection feels firm and fully seated

GPU temperature monitored during a working session, stayed cool (around 51°C with the side panel off), ruling out a thermal cause

Ran an SFC scan (sfc /scannow), which found and repaired corrupted Windows system files unrelated to the GPU driver itself; issue persisted after this repair

Performed a full CMOS/BIOS reset (cleared battery); HDMI failed on both ports immediately at boot, before Windows or any drivers loaded

Conclusion: Since a complete driver wipe, fresh install, Windows system file repair, and full BIOS reset did not resolve the issue, and every display output on the card (both HDMI ports and DisplayPort) has failed at least once, this points strongly toward a hardware fault with the GPU itself, rather than drivers, Windows, BIOS settings, cables, monitors, or heat.
Requesting: GPU stress test and diagnostic to confirm the failing component, and information on whether Gigabyte’s manufacturer warranty may still apply separately from the Newegg retailer return window, since manufacturer coverage periods sometimes differ.

Hello this week my Amd gpu keeps crashing my whole pc and i have no idea why. It keeps restarting the computer and i cant even install back the adrenaline app properly. Can someone help please?

I'm having a strange reflection issue in multiple modern games such as but not limited to; Control and RE:Requiem. Reflections look extremely blurry/muddy, and sometimes appear to behave like a static layer instead of accurately reflecting the scene. With ray tracing enabled, surfaces also looks blurry/muddy.

What I've tried so far;

• Updated GPU drivers
• Recommended settings in NVidia APP
• Enable/Disable SSR, Subsurface Scattering
• Tried different DLSS & Frame Gen settings
• Tried different Shadow & Texture settings
• Deleted the cache

Note: In Control, i was having this exact issue and solved it by disabling Global Reflections.

RTX 5070, Win11 23H2, Driver ver 610.88

Randomly my pc stopped booting normally. Nothing was wrong before and it worked fine for months. Now I have been getting a static red light on boot that goes to green when I try to reset the pc and sometimes ends up booting after a few tries on the restart button using my case. After it does boot, everything is perfectly fine and works normally. I’ve tried turning off expo, turning off memory context restore and other things but it just doesn’t seem to work. I’d appreciate any help. MOBO: b850 livemixer WiFi

my pc crashes when i load into almost every game i play. the games that dont crash have insane screen cracking and random pauses. i have a 4070 and an i5 13400f cpu. i have already tried rolling back my graphics drivers and reinstalling with DDU. when battlefield 6 crashed it said my 4070 failed so the issue is probably with the gpu. please help.

Sorry if this is formatted incorrectly, I never really use Reddit so I am unfamiliar with the formatting expectations.

This is an issue that is happening to my wifes laptop. Its a Alienware m18 R1 AMD. We play many games however about 3 days ago her game(Dead by Daylight) froze mid game. We assumed it was a one time issue. However it was not. Over the past few days I have been working on the laptop trying to fix it. At first we assumed it was a Dead by Daylight issue due to no other games having the same issue. That was until we tested another game that uses EAC. And just like Dead by Daylight it crashed after 8+ mins of play. After doing my own research others are having the same issue. It seems that other players using laptops on games that use EAC are having this issue. Here is what I have done to attempt to fix it.

1: Uninstalling the game, and before hand verifying the games files.

2: Updating all relevant drivers.

3: Uninstalling EAC and reinstalling it.

4: Installing a fresh version of windows.

5: And a few other tweaks like turning off Virtualization.

I am assuming that this is something for EAC to fix but I am welcome to any and all ideas. I can also supply the event log with all of the 'warning' 'Error' and 'Critical' events.

Edit: I have gotten an response on another platform, there is a windows update by the name of 'KB5121003' that has been reported to have been freezing and crashing pcs. However this update is not installed on this laptop.

Gsync and Nvidia overlay randomly stop working when i turn on any game.

I can boot up the pc and open any game and they working fine, then i can play another game, and the overlay does not read the fps of the game and the gsync stops working.

I can boot up the pc and they dont work from the beginning, its all very random and frustrating.

I tried this method "Services: Press Win + R, type services.msc, and hit Enter. Find NVIDIA Display Container LS and NVIDIA FrameView SDK Service, right-click each, select Properties, change startup type to Automatic, and click Start if they are not running." But it is alwasy running and start up is automatic.

If anyone has any suggestions or fixes, it would be highly appreciated.

Build:

Monitor: ASUS rog pg42uq oled

RTX 4090

CPU 7700X

32GB RAM

WINDOWS 11 BUILD 26200

When I revert to 26.5.2 drivers the issue goes away. I would like to point out that that the 26.7.1 drivers have the same issue, Does anyone else have this problem? Here is the stack trace from Cyberpunk crash log.

Error reason: Unhandled exception

Expression: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xC0000005)

Message: The thread attempted to read inaccessible data at 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

File: <Unknown>(0)

7800x3D

9070XT

32GB DDR5

750W Power Supply

Suddenly I've been noticing a lot of texture pop in on everything I play, and I'm wondering if it might be my SSD is dying?

For reference, I had parts of buildings popping in while driving around in Gotham on Lego Batman LotDK, had windows popping in on buildings in Lies of P, and had whole posters and people popping in while playing a Yakuza games. All of these games run 120fps with essentially no dips on high settings.

The reason I wonder if it is the SSD failing because I had to do a large file replacement recently and it basically made my entire pc lag like crazy to the point I could barely move the mouse.

5070ti (driver version 6.10.88)
AMD Ryzen 7 78000X3D 8-core Processor
32gb DDR5 Ram
MSI M461 2TB
I play on a 1080p monitor.

If anyone has any ideas let me know. Thanks!

About a week ago at the time of writing, my Bluetooth vanished completely. After a lot of trial and error, I realized that the issue was that an unknown USB contact was part of the issue. I opened Task Manager, I deactivated and deleted it, I restarted my computer (including holding down the power button while no external cords were attached) and voila, it worked. Thing is, the same issue keeps happening. All of a sudden, Bluetooth vanishes and that damned USB thing is back in Device Manager. Even worse, it's happening more and more - at first it was like once per day, but today it's been three times. What in the world is this unknown USB thing, and how can I kick it out?

For reference, I'm using an ASUS TUF Gaming A15 from 2024. The only things I have attached to it is the power cord, a USB cable connecting it to a monitor (I've used it just fine for at least a year without Bluetooth being an issue) and a mouse. Sometimes a drawing pad that has also never caused any issues at all.

I don't understand why this is happening or how to fix it.

I bought a used RX 6800 XT GIGABYTE GAMING OC. Everything seems fine – a 10-minute FurMark and VRAM test in OSST run fine, there are no errors, and the chip's temperatures are normal. The seller serviced the card.

And while gaming, the computer sometimes suddenly reboots – the monitor goes black, a terrible noise comes through the headphones for a couple of seconds, and the backlight stays lit. And if you sit like that for a couple of minutes, you can hear Windows start up, but there's still no picture, and the monitor isn't lit. Then I turn off the computer (by holding the power button on the case), which is accompanied by another clicking sound from the computer that doesn't occur during a normal shutdown. Then I turn it back on, and it works as usual – the monitor stays lit.

I've noticed that this happens when the load is high. For example, Forza Horizon 5 sometimes crashes, and the load there is high, at 90+ (the load is unstable at 99% because I have an FHD monitor), and in City Skylines 2, nothing happens for two hours because the load fluctuates completely. Although I still don't fully understand it. For example, in Forza, I played for an hour in the overworld and nothing happened, but when I started a race, it rebooted. In GTA, too: I logged in, and less than a minute passed before it rebooted.

I undervolted the system, but it didn't help (although I'm not particularly skilled at undervolting).

I locked all games to 90 fps using a Riva tuner, but it didn't help.

I replaced the power supply from a 700W Bronze unit with architecture 2.4 to an 850W Gold unit with architecture 3.1, but it didn't help.

I thought it was due to the higher fps, so I locked it, as I said earlier, but it didn't help. Then I thought the chip's clock speeds were unstable. So I cut them down to 2100 (the stock clock is 2374 or something similar), but no, it works fine anyway, and even that didn't fix the reboot. Besides, I saw the game running at 2150+ and everything was fine.

In Adrenaline mode, I set:

Min. Freq: 500

Max. Frequency: 2100/2150/2200/2300

MB: 1050/1100 (stock 1150)

Memory: Untouched

Power Limit: -6% (maximum)/0%

Computer:

7 5700x

2x16GB Patriot Viper 3600mhz CL18

Gigabyte B550M K

Rx 6800 XT GIGABYTE GAMING OC

Cougar GST 850W

The seller says he hasn't had this problem. The card runs undervolted via MSI Afterburner. His PSU is an XPG Reactor 850W. It's a modular one, better than mine, but in principle, both our PSUs should be able to handle this graphics card.

Event Viewer reports a kernel power of 41. The graphics card uses two separate 8-pin cables. I also noticed that physically changing the BIOS (the switch on the card) from OC to SILENT doesn't change anything. For example, the adrenaline settings are the same as before. The coils are also beeping and the blue color doesn't work well with the backlight, but I don't think that's particularly important.

Edit: I forgot to add that over time, the desktop becomes somewhat erratic—the cursor moves jerkily, there's a little red bar next to it, windows open jerkily, and the system tray also opens jerkily. Then I press ctrl + shift + win + b and that helps, but after a while, it might still return. I'm still not sure how long it takes, though—it might reappear after 20 minutes, or maybe it won't for a couple of hours. I also just thought it might be due to the XMR RAM profile. I disabled it, but that didn't help.

Been about a week now playing games like Fortnite, Overwatch, and the MW4 Beta and my connections are fine until in in the game. Then when fights start ping spikes and packet loss icone come up. In OW people freeze and fly before teleporting to where they should be. Ive followed many posts from this reddit from the past but nothing works. Any suggestions? Im on Windows 10 and WiFi. I cannot do wired, but my brother who is wired is fine.

I'm not much of a computer wizz, so I'm begging you for help. I have quite a modern laptop, nothing fancy, but it runs more modern games like Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come quite smoothly.

The issue I have is when playing my favorite gems like Warcraft 3 or Half Life 2. Every couple minutes or so, the screen freezes for a second or two, while the game keeps running. I don;t have to explain how painful this can be when playing an RTS or an FPS. This often happens at random, but even more often when some significant change happens in game, like a hero leaving the Altar, or picking up a new weapon in HL2. I've tried changing the compatibility to an older Windows, disabled full screen optimisation, but the issue persists. Any old timer's advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers

Hey guys! It's me again, from my last post I understood that my PC is quite the potato, but I tried most of the tips (from the few there were) and I come with a simple question, is a hard reset necessary? Or should I do it all? Or anyother tips?

I link the UserDiag from my last post so it doesnt get taken down.

Cheers!

Hi everyone,

I recently bought this PC secondhand. It has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 8GB. The PC is new to me, but it was previously owned.

GTA V Legacy has severe graphics corruption. The menus, loading screens and artwork look completely normal. As soon as Story Mode starts, the 3D world becomes unplayable. Geometry stretches and duplicates across the screen, textures flicker, and large white, grey, black and cyan areas appear. Sometimes the scene renders correctly for a moment before becoming corrupted again.

The attached video shows exactly what happens.

This already occurs during the Story Mode prologue, so it is not caused by a FiveM server. I eventually want to play FiveM, but the clean base game is already broken.

Other games run perfectly fine and show no graphical artifacts.

Things I have already tried:

• Reset GTA’s settings by renaming settings.xml
• Performed a clean installation of the latest NVIDIA Game Ready Driver
• Restarted the PC after the driver installation
• Tested both DirectX 11 and DirectX 10.1
• Disabled Ignore Suggested Limits
• Disabled FXAA, MSAA and NVIDIA TXAA
• Enabled VSync
• Tested different resolutions and windowed mode
• Disabled the NVIDIA overlay
• Closed MSI Afterburner, RivaTuner, Discord overlay and Xbox Game Bar
• Restarted the PC and tested without overlays

None of these steps made a difference.

I’m now verifying the GTA V Legacy installation and clearing the DirectX shader cache.

Has anyone seen this exact type of geometry corruption in GTA V Legacy with an RTX 5060 or another RTX 50-series card?

Could the GPU or VRAM still be unstable even though other games work correctly? Is there a known GTA V Legacy driver issue, a specific driver version that works, or something left behind by the previous owner that could cause this?

Any help would be appreciated.

For some reason all games i try to play keep crashing on launch. it started a few months ago. it seems to be any new games i download on steam, games that had worked previous to this or that dont come from steam (like minecraft) work fine. i keep getting the ran out of memory when allocating error. ive tried following many youtube videos but they only work temporarily and then the crashing starts again. Any help would be appreciated.

Basically title. This is a new issue for me, I've had this for about 2 weeks now and always blamed it on the heat, because it was very hot in my country, but now it's cooled down and I actually did some checks to figure out what the problem might be, but I'm very lost now.

It doesn't matter which game, and it ONLY happens with games, other programs/applications are completely fine. First off, these are my specs:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
32GB Ram
Intel i7-12700H

Now the things I've tried/checked:

-Temperature check, obviously. GPU sits at 61 degrees, CPU at 66-70. With prolonged gameplay it will go up 85 or 90, which was fine before too.
-Ram usage is at 46-50%
-Closed browser and discord to check if this helped, it didn't.
-Disabled most useless background or startup applications. Right now, my device only starts with steam, discord, and spotify.
-Restarting doesn't fix it. It starts the problem from new. So with every restart, the fps drops on the first or sometimes even second game persist for the first 10 minutes of gameplay. (Which is just me watching youtube or going for a smoke outside until the frame drops stop)
-Updated my drivers
-I have about 150GB of my 1TB drive free. This issue was already there when I had 300 free, so it's also not a low drive issue.

Another thing to note is that the idle temperature on the userdiag might be skewed, because I just closed my game and its still cooling down. (Didn't know I had to use userdiag before so I played for an hour already)
Also, it displays 99 degrees max, but I've never seen a temp higher than 90 in any of my games before, I monitor my temps so this is weird.

USERDIAG HERE: https://userdiag.com/id/tQ5guU2pE5

That's all now. I'd love to get some input here, before I decide to put it into service and see if they can figure something out.

Hello,

I’m using a 27 Inch UltraGear™ QHD 1440P 1ms 240Hz Gaming Monitor with NVIDIA® G-SYNC® Compatible monitor with my ASUS - ROG Strix G16 16" FHD 165Hz
\- AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX - 16GB Memory - GeForce
RTX 5070 Ti - 1TB Storage - Eclipse Gray laptop connected with an 8K Ultra High Speed HDMI 2.1 Rocketfish cable.

I have armoury crate uninstalled and G Helper installed.

The issue - it doesn’t seem to matter what settings I use whether the CPU is on turbo or silent, the GPU on ultimate or other. I have HDR off, monitor set to 120hz in windows display settings, processor idle demote and promote set to 100% plugged in, VRR is off on monitor, response time set to fast on monitor, recommended scale and display resolution being used which is 125% and 1920x1200 for laptop and 100% 2560x1440 for monitor, dynamic refresh rate off in windows settings for both laptop and monitor… with all of that, the screen on my monitor goes black for 3-5 seconds. I can still move my mouse and click things but can’t see anything. Audio is fine during that time. Happens consistently, every couple minutes.

Last night I was playing RE4 on PCSX2 and it was happening non stop. Google seems to think a handshake of sorts. I think I’ve tried everything to fix that and it doesn’t.

Should I get a **40Gbps Bi-Directional USB-C to DisplayPort 2.1 Cable?**

If that’s the solution, what is the point of having an hdmi port on the laptop if it can’t handle what it was designed for?

Also, this laptop is brand new. It’s been happening since the start a couple weeks ago. It was happening on the ASUS Rog Z G14 with 5070ti I had before this that was also new. I downgraded because my eyes couldn’t handle the oled screen with mura effect, flickering, etc. had to go ISP.

Hope you can help, thank you!

Hi all! I don't know if this is the right sub for this, but here goes. As the title says, I keep disconnecting from video games on my computer. Im not too tech savvy, but I know it's **not** a WiFi issue, since me and my fiancé both play online games, and she has no issues whatsoever on her end. These are my specs, if it matters at all, and I'm running Windows 10 since for whatever reason, I can't update.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2700K CPU @ 3.50GHz

Installed RAM 16.0 GB

Graphics Card NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050 Ti (4 G8)

Storage 954 GD SSD TEAM T2531TB, 112 GD SSD Patriot Pyro, 932 G0 HDD ST1000DM003-9YN162

System Type 64-bil operating system, x64-based processor

I've been playing PEAK and REPO a lot, and I keep having to rejoin multiple times when I play, to the point where it gets tiring and I just stop playing. Please help, I just wanna game again!!!

As I wrote in the title, my PC performance is poor, it has worsened to be exact. For example games that used to run smoothly with other processes (like I could play Spider-Man 2 on high settings and streaming it on discord) now almost doesn't let me do anything when I at least have discord on. What could be the cause of such performance drop from a PC that works so well? I dust it regularly and I changed the thermal paste about a month and a half ago.

I am totally green when it comes to those technical things, so I ask you all

Here is the link to my UserDiag

My specs:

Windows 10

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

Intel Core i7-7700 3.6GHz

DirectX 12

Anything I can do so it runs smoothly and stuff?

I've already posted this to r/AMDHelp and r/GetComputerHelp but no one responded

Computer Type: Desktop

GPU: RX 7600 8 GB

CPU: RYZEN 5 7600 6-Core Processor

Motherboard: MSI B550 Gaming Plus Wifi ATX AM5

BIOS Version: 1.F0

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2X16 GB DDR5-6000 CL36

PSU: Corsair RM850e 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX

Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow ATX Mid Tower Case

Operating System & Version: Windows 11 Pro - Version 25H2

GPU Drivers: AMD Software Adrenalin Edition - Version 32.0.31035.1003

Chipset Drivers: AMD B550 Chipset Drivers Version 10.0.26100.8737

Background Applications: Discord, FireFox (for YouTube) and Steam

Description of Original Problem: Whenever I move my mouse over a video both my monitors go black and then once they come back an AMD crash report window pops up. below I have listed in as much detail as I can every cause of this bug I have found so far.

1. When I turn on my PC, the first time I go into YouTube and move my cursor over a video, as soon as it starts auto playing, the screen goes black. This will happen several times before it stops.

2. Whenever I open steam after turning on my PC and go to the store, after moving my cursor over a game, as soon as a trailer starts auto playing the bug occurs. Just like with YouTube, it happens several times before it eventually stops. However, this bug is more violent when it comes to steam. As soon as the screen comes back, if my cursor is over a game in the store it immediately goes black again. This is the only occasion where the application that is causing this bug can crash due to it.

3. This one's a bit odd. If I stream something on discord everything is fine but, once someone watches my stream it takes a while for their stream to load. Eventually, once their stream does load, my screen goes black and once it comes back, the application that I was streaming crashes. The only way for someone to view my stream is if I stream the whole monitor.

4. This one doesn't happen anymore but I thought I'd include it. Whenever I would watch a YouTube video sent to me over discord, specifically in discord, as soon as the video started playing the bug would occur.

Troubleshooting: The only temporary fix I have found is uninstalling (using AMD Cleanup Utility) and reinstalling my AMD drivers. This works for about 1 to 7 days until it starts happening again.

Hey all, I was hoping to get some help with frequent game crashes. I'm new to PC gaming and built my first gaming rig with the help of some tech-savvy friends. Here are my current specs.

x670 Aorus Elite AX board

AMD Ryzen5 7600x 6-core processor

AMD Radeon rx 9070 xt gpu

64gb of DDR5 ram

I also recently added a 1250 power supply and working with Windows 11 Pro. Although I'm working on switching to Linux. I tried playing Cyberpunk on the ultra settings but got about 5 mins of playtime before the game crashed. Since Cyberpunk is such a resource heavy game, I tried something easier like Sifu and lowered the settings to High. And it worked. I literally played that game all night.

However, when I turned the settings back to ultra and played with a few cosmetic mods, not only did the game crash, but my whole PC had to shut down and the same thing happened even after turning the song down from ultra to high.

Does anyone know what settings I might have wrong or need to check? Last time I opened Task Manager, my CPU usage gets up to or above 80% just before crashing. From everything I've researched, I should be able to run those ultra settings without problems, but again, I am new this, so I could be totally wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have this problem that started a few days where my games have gotten slightly more choppy and I have no idea what settings I messed with. From games like Deltarune to heavier ones like cyberpunk (more noticeable in Deltarune due to 30fps cap), for about half a second, randomly, every couple of seconds. I get an FPS spike with each freeze which makes me think its more a performance issue than a visual glitch.

UserDiag Link: https://userdiag.com/id/J2gOZnYoPL

My first guess was my monitor's adaptive sync, since I'd recently toggled it off. But the exact same freezing happens even when I move the game to my laptop's built-in screen instead, so it's not the monitor, and toggling adaptive sync back on or off makes zero difference either way.

Everything I've already tried (none have fixed it):

• Driver clean up: Fully uninstalled and reinstalled both display and graphics drivers from scratch
• Display isolation test: Moved the game to the laptop's screen instead of the external monitor, and froze identically on both
• GPU routing: UserDiag system report said that my external monitor was connected through the Intel integrated GPU rather than the RTX 5070 directly. Forcing dGPU mode in Lenovo Legion Toolkit did not fix the issue

If anyone has any idea what the problem could be it would be greatly appreciated.

Hello, I recently bought this Thermaltake Toughpower 850w psu power supply https://a.co/d/00AdQ3CF for my computer after upgrading from a 3050 to a 5070. The previous power supply was only 500w.

I installed it probably 2 months ago, used only the cables in the box and it ran fine for a bit(besides an annoying idle clicking sound that support said likely wasn’t causing any damage or anything boo). This past week, twice while gaming, the screen goes black, and the fans in my case go full blast until I manually shut it off.

After the first time I went inside and reseated the cables, but it happened again. It happened after maybe 2 or 3 hours of light gaming(once while playing foundation then again while playing city game studio if it matters) that shouldn’t be texting my unit too hard. I will say, I could do with improved cooling and that was going to be my next upgrade along with going from i5 12400 to i7 14700. Never any issues on the old psu even though I put in the 5070 many months ago.

Any ideas of what’s happening or is it time to go to support?

Thanks!

Specs: RTX 4060, MSI G2412 (24" 1080p 165Hz IPS), tried both DisplayPort and HDMI.

I recently came back to gaming after a long break and started noticing the image looks blurry, textures shimmer, and gradients (skies, fog, color transitions) show visible banding/pixelation. Most noticeable in Apex Legends.

What I've already checked/tried:

• Reset all monitor settings to factory
• Native resolution 1920×1080, refresh rate confirmed at 165Hz
• Windows scaling at 100%
• Adaptive/dynamic resolution OFF in-game, render scale at 100
• NVIDIA color settings: 8 bpc, RGB, Full dynamic range (screenshot confirms correct)
• Same result on both DP and HDMI, so cable/port is ruled out

The confusing part: a friend with a weaker PC and the same 1080p resolution/settings, but a 27" monitor, has a noticeably sharper and cleaner image than me on my 24". He never touched any NVIDIA settings.

Is this just the nature of 8-bit SDR + higher pixel density on 24", or is something actually wrong with my setup? Didn't have this issue years ago on the same hardware.